Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Living My Whole Life in One Night

I used to date a guy who worked in the financial industry and was frequently sent by his firm to various industry conferences. The conferences were hosted in nice locations – Arizona or Florida, say, in the wintertime – at well-appointed hotels, and he told me of having witnessed many colleagues who, at the close of a day of official conference business, tried valiantly -- perhaps even desperately -- “to live their whole lives in a single night.”

I had business out of town yesterday, and I put up for the night at a hotel in another city in another state. After checking in, I made my way to the bar, where a lone accoustic guitarist in a cowboy hat was playing Elton John covers for a small, almost completely unresponsive crowd. I took a seat near him out of sympathy, and, while I was able to fend off the advances of a traveling salesman who was unfazed by my mention of my husband and son, I soon found myself, glass in hand, sharing the mic with the guitarist in a rendition of “Sweet Baby James.” As the friend of a friend said to herself as she rode the city bus to the New York State Theater to make her début as Carmen at New York City Opera, “This is not as I had pictured it.”

Above: Bill Murray in his iconic turn as Nick the Lounge Singer on Saturday Night Live.

16 comments:

Woops, ran some sentences together. Try again:I'm shocked no one else has commented on this, so I'll at least mention that your post brought back some great SNL memories for me. Bill was the best sleazy Vegas singer ever...

Since you brought it up, you're right. Although the early SNL seems sophomoric on the surface, what made it great was the true social observations and commentary that boiled beneath the surface. Nick was sad and yet we all laughed.

I was the youngest kid in the family and wasn't allowed to watch SNL until I was a teenager. I'd hear my sisters talking about it every Sunday morning and wanted to see what it was all about. So, I'd sneak downstairs and hide behind the sofa while they watched it. I remember seeing "Nick" and wanting to laugh but couldn't because there was a weird feeling that made me feel sorry for him. Sort of like an Emmett Kelly. I think he was the real embodiment of Pascal's horrible contradiction that he saw in man. The glory mired in the filth. And all too real.

That is frighteningly well-said, Christopher. I agree. The segments with Nick are really too sad to laugh at. Did you ever see the movie "Waiting for Guffman"? With the exception of the actual, brilliant show-within-a-show, "Red, White, and Blaine," I felt the same way.

This resembles to an uncanny degree an evening in the mid-'70s when I went with a friend, a former mildly successful rock musician, to see a friend of his who was still in the game--appearing nightly at the Holiday Inn, perched on a stool with a guitar, doing pop covers. Besides my friend and me, I think there were two other people in the bar, middle-aged female drunks who clapped and cheered. Alas, no gracious classical singer came to brighten the sad atmosphere.

Maclin, you are underscoring the sadness of the atmosphere, and it *was* sad, and, you're right, a lot like the night you lived in the seventies. I confess to ordering my dinner to go and grabbing it and fleeing to my room right after "Sweet Baby James," but not before the salesman made it clear that he'd be at the bar waiting for me to come back (which, of course, I didn't). But, I dunno, when in Rome, I guess. . .